Oracle Debuts Exalogic X3-2 Server

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison took to the stage during his Oracle OpenWorld keynote to make a couple of big announcements, namely new Oracle Public Cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offerings and Oracle Database 12c, which he described as "the first multitenant database in the world." But what about business servers?

While overshadowed by Ellison's cloud computing ambitions, the company also unveiled some significant updates to its flagship business application server platform.

Exalogic X3-2 Engineered Systems

Outfitted with new Intel Xeon chips, massive amounts of DRAM and flash storage, the new Exalogic X3-2 was engineered to make short work of resource-intensive business applications and big cloud computing workloads, says Oracle executive vice president Hasan Rizvi.

"With the latest release of Oracle Exalogic, customers can experience extreme performance across critical applications and vast reductions in the complexity of their application infrastructures, while improving their time-to-market and further reducing IT risk and costs," said Rizvi in a company statement.

Much of that "extreme performance" comes courtesy of an 8-core, 2.9 GHz "Sandy Bridge" Xeon server processor, whose 32nm multi-core microarchitecture gives the X3-2 a significant data crunching edge over its predecessor. Oracle says that the Exalogic X3-2 can deliver 3.5x better application performance than the X2-2. The Xeons also allow Oracle to pack more processing cores into a system, from 360 to 480 cores in a full rack.

RAM-tastic

The Exalogic X3-2 also features support for additional physical RAM, up to 7.7 terabytes (TB) versus 2.9 TB on the X2-2. With the help of Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) support and server virtualization, Oracle claims that the new Exalogics can accommodate up to a 60x increase in application deployment density.

Organizations with X2-2 systems in their data centers won't get left behind as Oracle pushes forward with Exalogic. "Existing Oracle Exalogic X2-2 systems can also be upgraded with Oracle Exalogic X3-2 compute nodes," says the company.

On the software and systems management front, the X3-2 supports Exalogic Elastic Cloud Software 2.0 and ships with Oracle Enterprise Manager 12c. In terms of software costs, Oracle is assuaging the concerns of prospective customers by touting new Trusted Partitions support, a flexible licensing model that results in no price increase for the Oracle Exalogic X3-2.